Site Mobile Navigation

Unfettered Rose Inquiry a Contrast to N.B.A.’s Case

Fay Vincent, baseball’s deputy commissioner when Pete Rose was banished for betting on baseball, watched N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern discuss the gambling accusations against a former referee yesterday, and said he felt a kinship across a generation.

“It breaks my heart,” Vincent said in a telephone interview. “It’s an enormous crisis for all sports. Gambling is the one thing that can bring sports to its knees. One hopes David is correct, that it’s just a rogue official. He did the best he could, but I don’t think he knows the whole story.”

What Stern knew compared with what Vincent or Bart Giamatti, baseball’s commissioner at the time, knew appears to be different.

Baseball’s investigation, which was conducted by the lawyer John M. Dowd, was not initiated by the F.B.I., and Giamatti did not have to wait for federal prosecutors to alert him to Rose’s activities.

“Whatever information we generated, we knew about,” said Vincent, who watched Stern’s news conference on television. “But when the feds are doing it, they may tell you things, and they may not. Their job is to lock the guy up, and you have to come second.” He added: “It’s easy to control your own investigation. Ours was easy.”

The evidence that Dowd developed in his investigation was for baseball to use without the type of constraints imposed by federal authorities, and Giamatti was later free to speak as he chose when he barred Rose in August 1989.

Separately, as Dowd was looking into Rose’s gambling, a federal grand jury was weighing tax evasion charges against him; Rose pleaded guilty in 1990 to filing false income tax returns and served five months in federal prison.

How much Stern has been told by the F.B.I. and prosecutors is not known. Several times yesterday he paused to think how far he should go in certain remarks; he prefaced certain responses by saying, “I understand,” and deferred some answers until “the investigative process” had run its course. At one point, he said, “All my information is secondhand.”

Vincent, a former lawyer for the Securities and Exchange Commission, said, “It’s inconceivable that they’re telling him everything,” especially with a federal grand jury deliberating on the case.

Stern, also a lawyer, said he learned of the allegations against the referee, Tim Donaghy, in a phone call from the F.B.I. on June 20. Before that, an investigator working for the league looked into a lawsuit involving Donaghy concerning his neighbors and into whether he had violated league policy by gambling at a casino in Atlantic City. He said the league followed the gambling story “to the end of the trail” and found nothing.

Photo

Pete Rose was banished in 1989.Credit
Tom Uhlman/Associated Press

Vincent said that “by and large the cooperation between the federal government and professional sports is very close.”

He cited an instance in 1989, when the F.B.I. informed baseball that the umpires Richie Garcia and Frank Pulli, and Don Zimmer, then the Cubs’ manager, were caught on a wiretap making bets on basketball and football games with a small-time bookie and drug dealer in Tampa, Fla.

Dowd conducted the investigation and questioned Pulli and Garcia in a New York law office. Vincent said that Garcia “got hot-headed and wanted to leave the room.”

“He said, ‘What I did was perfectly legal, and I don’t want to be part of this witch hunt,’ ” Vincent said.

Vincent said that he told Garcia, “ ‘I can’t keep you here, but when you shut the door, you’re out of baseball for life.’ ”

According to Vincent, Richie Phillips, then the executive director and general counsel of the umpires’ union, told Garcia, “I will not be able to get you back if you do that.” Garcia calmed down and did not leave the room.

Dowd’s investigation found no proof that the three bet on baseball games, and Vincent gave them two years’ probation. “There was no basis to throw them out of baseball,” he said, but added, “I scared the bejesus out of them.”

Pulli later became an umpire supervisor, and Garcia, who refused to discuss the incident yesterday, now serves in that position.

Vincent said that throughout his time as commissioner, which ended in 1992, he feared another gambling scandal among players — “more Pete Roses who thought they were above the system” — but not with umpires.

“My father was an N.F.L. official, and I always held officials in high regard,” he said. “That’s why I was so disappointed.”

He said the Donaghy case was one that should remind Stern and other commissioners to further tighten deterrents against gambling within their sports.

“It’s naïve not to recognize the threat to corrupt sports through gambling and naïve not to think gamblers aren’t looking for an advantage,” he said. “They’re there, they have a lot of money, and in the right circumstances, they use it on vulnerable people.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Unfettered Rose Inquiry A Contrast to N.B.A.’s Case. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe